Time Listings

Wednesday, April 20

DANNY THOMAS SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* "The Road to Lebanon" has Thomas teaming up with Bing Crosby for a "Road . . ." parody. Claudine Auger, Hugh Downs and Sheldon Leonard are posted along the route, and Bob Hope makes a brief appearance--to protest.

TESTING: RIGHT, LEFT OR CENTER (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A news special that promises to tell each viewer where he stands politically in relationship to the rest of the nation.

Thursday, April 21

THE CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). A Majority of One, in which Sir Alec Guinness plays a Japanese businessman, and Rosalind Russell a Jewish widow from Brooklyn.

MICKIE FINN'S (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). A new music and entertainment series set in the San Diego nightery of the same name, and starring Proprietors Fred and Mickie Finn. Premiere.

Friday, April 22

THE POPPY IS ALSO A FLOWER (ABC, 7:30-9 p.m.). The Xerox series of top-talent drama specials on the U.N. has been disappointing so far, but this one looks promising. Director Terrence Young (Dr. No) uses an Ian Fleming story to illustrate the U.N.'s efforts to control narcotics, and the cast is a U.N. in itself: Senta Berger, Stephen Boyd, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, Hugh Griffith, Jack Hawkins, Rita Hayworth, Trevor Howard, E. G. Marshall, Marcello Mastroianni, Gilbert Roland, Omar Sharif, Nadja Tiller, Eli Wallach and Princess Grace Kelly.

Saturday, April 23

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). A celebration of the fifth anniversary of this excellent series, with segments from previous shows including Grand Prix auto races, rodeos, figure skating, a rattlesnake hunt, barrel jumping and many others.

Sunday, April 24

DIRECTIONS '66 (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Pearl Lang is choreographer and solo dancer of Prayer for a Dark Bird, a ballet based on passages from the Navajo Night Chant. Earl Wild composed the music and Marian Seldes reads the chant.

VIET NAM WEEKLY REVIEW (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). The week's developments, in color.

Monday, April 25

THE SURPRISING MIDDLEWEST (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Massachusetts-born Robert Preston guides a tour through Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan in this series of specials on regions of the U.S. Some of the scheduled participants: Jazzman Dave Brubeck, Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi, Repertory Theater Head Tyrone Guthrie and Architect Bertram Goldberg.

Tuesday, April 26

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). MGM's The Time Machine, which puts the clock back to the early days of science fiction and H. G. Wells's story about a man who travels into the future. Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux star.

THEATER

On Broadway

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT! When Hal Holbrook shuffles off the stage at the end of his one-man show, it is as if one were bidding good night to the incorrigible Clemens himself. An extraordinary physical impersonation and uncanny dramatic recreation of one of Americana's keenest humorists.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! Playwright Brian Friel, recognizing that each man carries within him both his severest critic and "his most appreciative fan, converts his insight into a striking dramatic device. Two Dublin actors--Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly--capture our fancy and sympathy as the public and private selves of a young man forsaking his Irish village for an American metropolis.

SWEET CHARITY. The electric performance of Dancer Gwen Verdon and the kinetic choreography of Director Bob Fosse spark Neil Simon's blown-out fuse of a book about a dance-hall hostess' futile search for a lifetime partner.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE is a compulsively fascinating dramatic typhoon in which John Osborne's voice--splenetic, grieving and caustically humorous--is heard with more furious personal intensity than at any time since Look Back in Anger. As a defeated solicitor for whom life has become a playing field of pain, Nicol Williamson gives a performance of epic dimensions and phenomenal resourcefulness.

CACTUS FLOWER. Sex farces are to the French what fairy tales are to children. In this version, the dour duckling (Lauren Bacall) becomes a swan just in time to tame a big bad wolf (Barry Nelson). With all the laughs, no one seems to care whether or not they live happily ever after.

RECORDS

Spoken

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE (Caedmon) is a powerful distillation in sound of the most sustained assault on the senses that Broadway theatergoers have experienced in years. While the mind's eye must do some of the listener's work, the sensation of being imprisoned in a limbo of mad souls is fearsomely convincing. Patrick Magee as Sade, Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, Ian Richardson as Marat, and the disciplined ensemble players of the Royal Shakespeare Company are, in this recording, precisely what they have been onstage--perfect.

THE MASTER BUILDER (Caedmon). No single drama of Ibsen's is more Freudian, and hence accessible to the modern mind. The play is a situation tragedy, and the symbols bleed. Solness, the artist-builder-husband, is vile in his self-absorption, and pitiable as he watches the tide of his creativity ebb. His wife is stifling and stifled. The young girl Hilde Wangel is Solness' mirage of the second chance, lost youth, lost inspiration, lost love recovered. But life is a role that man cannot rehearse or reverse. Sir Michael Redgrave as Solness thunders, hisses and froths like a wave crashing on a steep beach. Celia Johnson, as his wife, is as bleakly crisp as burnt bacon. However, Maggie Smith as Hilde is too much the calculating minx, seemingly unaware that the sliest seductive weapon of the young is youth.

THE HOSTAGE (Columbia). Whether through providential design or evolutionary quirk, an Irishman's tongue is the nimblest portion of his anatomy. The late Brendan Behan's tongue was rough, racy, tender and tart. His play, if it can be called that, is a cross between a magnificent barroom brawl and every vaudeville turn in the book of yesterday. Julie Harris and an intoxicatingly zestful company offer this bawdy, irreverent toast to the world of man.

WHAT PASSING BELL (Argo). If war exposes the beast in man, it sometimes brings out the best in literature, from The Trojan Women to War and Peace. This recording marches to the distant drum of World War I, and contains some of the finest and most moving war poetry ever written, notably by Britain's Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action in November 1918, and Siegfried Sassoon, who survived. The verbal montage of irony, pathos, and ribald gallantry is much akin to last season's searing musical, Oh What a Lovely War.

ROMEO AND JULIET (Caedmon) is a strange romance in this recording. Albert Finney, who can be as forceful as TNT, has conceived a Romeo who sounds like a world-weary anti-hero out of Chekhov. Claire Bloom is girlishly gigglish; yet Shakespeare's Juliet is young only in years, and packs a woman's wiles in a woman's body. The lovers are upstaged by the nurse, Dame Edith Evans, a paragon of timing, inflection and character immersion who could teach Finney and Bloom a thing or three about Shakespearean acting.

CINEMA

BORN FREE. Fine photography displaces some of the African lore in Joy Adamson's delightful book about the taming and untaming of Elsa the lioness, and this filmed biography glows with dusty golden beauty, the lion's share of it supplied by the big cats themselves.

MORGAN! A misfit artist tries to woo back his divorced wife by behaving like King Kong in a hilarious, offbeat comedy that might easily run amuck except for polished clowning by David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, two of Britain's showiest young stars.

HARPER. Private-eye melodrama is revived in lively style by Paul Newman, as a gum-chewing gumshoe whose search for a missing millionaire implicates Lauren Bacall, Arthur Hill and Shelley Winters.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. The life of Christ in a fresh and fascinating film based wholly on Scripture and played like an act of faith by a non-professional cast under Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.

SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. An Indian playboy (Shashi Kapoor) wavers between his movie-star mistress (Madhur Jaffrey) and an English actress (Felicity Kendal) who is touring the provinces with a troupe of tatty Shakespeareans. The real show is U.S. Director James Ivory's delicate study of fading British influence in India.

DEAR JOHN. The urgent biochemistry between a robust sailor (Jarl Kulle) on the make and a girl (Christina Schollin) who probably won't say no is analyzed to near-perfection by Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren, a sensitive defender of the thesis that sex sometimes precedes love.

THE GROUP. Mary McCarthy's bitchy bestseller about Vassar's class of '33 retains its period flavor in this movie version by Director Sidney Lumet, with eight captivating young actresses as the grads going forth to seek fulfillment of one kind or another during the Roosevelt era.

THE LAST CHAPTER. The long bitter history of Jewish life in Poland is ruefully recounted in rare stills and film clips, with a moving narration by Theodore Bikel.

BOOKS

Best Reading

PAPA HEMINGWAY, by A. E. Hotchner. An old friend paints a wonderfully perceptive and poignant portrait of the writer who was both a symbol and an idol to his generation.

A PASSIONATE PRODIGALITY, by Guy Chapman. This memoir of life and death in the trenches is an authentic classic of World War I, an elegy for a generation, written unsentimentally and unforgettably.

THE LAST BATTLE, by Cornelius Ryan. Historian-Journalist Ryan recounts the fall of Hitler's capital and details the Allied blunders and political naivete that allowed Stalin to seize Berlin as a prize.

THE DOUBLE IMAGE, by Helen MacInnes. Master Spywriter MacInnes again pits an innocent and firm-chinned hero against a murderous crew of international spies, and still again the result is a literate and topnotch suspense tale.

A GENEROUS MAN, by Reynolds Price. A North Carolina country boy comes to terms with the joys and responsibilities of manhood in this buoyant, funny novel.

THE FATAL IMPACT, by Alan Moorehead. Writing in the wake of Captain Cook, Bougainville and other great Pacific navigators and explorers, the superbly skilled journalist-historian Alan Moorehead takes soundings of philosophic depth--savage and civilized man in confrontations unresolved to this day.

TOO FAR TO WALK, by John Hersey. Author Hersey's Faustian tale of a sophomore who temporarily becomes the Devil's man rates only a B--, but his pitiless portrait of today's collegiate scene earns him an easy A.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Double Image, MacInnes (2 last week)

2. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (4)

3. The Source, Michener (1)

4. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (3)

5. Those Who Love, Stone (5)

6. The Adventurers, Robbins (6)

7. The Comedians, Greene (9)

8. Tell No Man, St. Johns (8)

9. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (7)

10. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (10)

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)

2. The Last Battle, Ryan (3)

3. Games People Play, Berne (5)

4. The Last 100 Days, Toland (4)

5. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (2)

6. Papa Hemingway, Hotchner

7. Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader

8. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (6)

9. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (7)

10. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey

*All times E.S.T. through April 23, E.D.T. thereafter.

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